The Elana R&D department has a focus to further develop a sutureless anastomosis technique that, as principle, can be clinically used for any indication where bypasses need to be constructed. The current design can be used for the so called “end to side”, “side to side” and “end to end” anastomoses. The huge advantage of such sutureless technique is that total operation time can be reduced and, because of avoiding suturing, a more aggressive strategy towards minimal invasive treatment options can be followed.

ELANA CLIP 3.0

Development of a sutureless clip to make the Elana technique easier and faster and hence safer for the patient. Through the use of this Clip device it is no longer necessary to make sutures deep in the brain in order to make a bypass without temporary occlusion of the blood flow. Through this clip the OR time of such a bypass surgery will decrease significantly which obviously will benefit the patient. During the last few years a PhD student of the neurosurgical department of UMC Utrecht, has intensively tested this newly developed device in various laboratory settings and it is now ready to be used in a clinical trial setting, to treat patients with an aneurysm or tumor that need the be treated with a non-occlusive bypass technique. A Clinical pilot study is momentarily ongoing at UMC Utrecht.

MID-SIZE ARTERIES

Implementation of a new sutureless clip to make a non-occlusive bypass in the brain on mid-size arteries. The current Elana Surgical Kit (see link a) and the newly developed Elana Clip (see link b1) can only be used on the large vessels in the brain on patients that can not tolerate a conventional bypass where the blood flow is temporary being occluded. However, there is still a (small) group of patients that is eligible for an Elana bypass, but cannot be treated with this technique because of the fact that the size of their blood vessel where the bypass needs to be placed is too small. Up till today these patients are being treated with a conventional bypass, which creates a relatively high risk of stroke or other serious complications. In collaboration with PhD student we are now developing and implementing a smaller, oval clip device. Through such a device a new group of patients with an aneurysm, tumor or ischemia can benefit from a safer, non-occlusive sutureless bypass technique.